Arthur B. Reeve

“ We might ride in hydroaeroplanes, delve into the very soul by psychanalysis, perhaps even run our machines by the internal forces of radium—even marry according to Galton or Mendel. But there would always be love, deep passionate love of the man for the woman, love which all the discoveries of science might perhaps direct a little less blindly, but the consuming flame of which not all the coldness of science could ever quench. No tampering with the roots of human nature could ever change the roots. ”

“ Kennedy tried the door of Northrop’s room, which was at the far end, in a corner, and communicated with the hall only through the main floor of the museum. It was locked. A pass-key from the janitor quickly opened it.
Such a sight as greeted us, I shall never forget. There, in his big desk-chair, sat Northrop, absolutely rigid, the most horribly contorted look on his features that I have ever seen—half of pain, half of fear, as if of something nameless.
Kennedy bent over. His hands were cold. ”

“ Verplanck. “You can see a car on it, now and then, through the trees, like a moving light.”
“Over there, I mean,” reiterated Kennedy, indicating the light as it flashed now faintly, then disappeared, to reappear further along, like a gigantic firefly in the night.
“N-no,” said Verplanck. “I don’t think the road runs down as far as that. It is further up the bay.”
“What is it then?” asked Kennedy, half to himself. “It seems to be traveling rapidly. Now it must be about opposite the Carter house. There—it has gone.” ”

“ I was astounded, bewildered at the revelation, the possibilities in those simple words, “The child is mine.” For a moment I was stunned. Then as the full meaning dawned on me I wondered in a flood of consciousness whether it was true. Was it the product of her drug-disordered brain? Had her desperate love for Hazleton produced a hallucination?
Kennedy, silent, saw that the case demanded quick action. I shall never forget the breathless ride down from the sanitarium to the Hazleton house on Riverside Drive. ”

“ Gunther settled himself easily back in a chair to speak as one having authority. “Well,” he began slowly, “Miss Pearcy, of course, hasn’t been living there much until lately. As for the others, perhaps this gentleman here from the Star knows that lead, once absorbed, may remain latent in the system and then make itself felt. It is like arsenic, an accumulative poison, slowly collecting in the body until the limit is reached, or until the body, becoming weakened from some other cause, gives way to it.” ”

“ So, you see, I come naturally by it.
“Not long ago I heard of Professor and Madame Rapport and their new Temple of the Occult. I went to it, and later Seward became interested, too. We have been taken into a sort of inner circle,” she continued fearfully, as though there were some evil power in the very words themselves, “the Red Lodge.”
“You have told Dr. Vaughn?” shot out Kennedy suddenly, his eyes fixed on her face to see what it would betray.
Veda leaned forward, as if to tell a secret, then whispered in a low voice, “He knows. Like us—he—he is a—Devil Worshiper!” ”

“ Kennedy cleared his throat slowly.
“I don’t know that I have much to say,” began Kennedy, still seated. “I suppose Mr. Atherton has told you I have been much interested in the peculiar state of health of Mrs. Atherton?”
No one spoke, and he went on easily: “There is something I might say, however, about the—er—what I call the chemistry of insanity. Among the present wonders of science, as you doubtless know, none stirs the imagination so powerfully as the doctrine that at least some forms of insanity are the result of chemical changes in the blood. ”

“ As he looked up he remarked to us, with his eyes fixed on Miss Lowe, “That was a ladies’ cigarette. Did you notice the size? There has been a woman in this case—presumably.”
The girl, suddenly transformed by the rapid-fire succession of discoveries, stood before us like a specter.
“The ‘Group,’ as anarchists call it,” pursued Craig, “is the loosest sort of organization conceivable, I believe, with no set membership, no officers, no laws—just a place of meeting with no fixity, where the comrades get together. Could you get us into the inner circle, Miss Lowe?” ”

“ In all these robberies we get a glimpse of as dark and mysterious a criminal as has ever been recorded. He may be—anybody. About his legitimacy, I believe, no question has ever been raised. And, I tell you, his arrest is going to create a greater sensation than even the remarkable series of robberies that he has planned or made possible. The question is, to my mind, who is this fence?”
McLear’s telephone rang and he handed the instrument to Craig.
“Yes, this is Professor Kennedy,” answered Craig. “Oh, too bad you’ve had to try all over to get me. ”

“ Kennedy reached quickly for the telephone. “There is one stream of scandal that can be dammed at its source,” he remarked, calling a number. “Hello. Klemm’s Sanitarium? I’d like to speak with Miss Haversham. What—gone? Disappeared? Escaped?”
He hung up the receiver and looked at me blankly. I was speechless.
A thousand ideas flew through our minds at once. Had she perceived the import of our last visit and was she now on her way to complete her plotted slander of Millicent Hazleton, though it pulled down on herself in the end the whole structure? ”

“ Atherton caught the look, read it, and answered quite frankly, “To tell the truth, I suppose I might have married Edith, before I met Eugenia, if Professor Crafts had not dissuaded me. But it wouldn’t have been real love—nor wise. You know,” he went on more frankly, now that the first hesitation was over and he realized that if he were to gain anything at all by Kennedy’s services, there must be the utmost candor between them, “you know cousins may marry if the stocks are known to be strong. But if there is a defect, it is almost sure to be intensified. ”

“ Vaughn still gazed from one to the other of us defiantly.
“You know what I mean,” persisted Kennedy, “the mumbo-jumbo—just as the Haitian obi man sticks pins in a doll or melts a wax figure of his enemy. That is supposed to be an outward sign. But back of this terrible power that people believe moves in darkness and mystery is something tangible—something real.” ”

“ Poe forgoes the aid of demons and works patiently and precisely by the scientific method. But the result is the same.”
“Yes,” agreed Kennedy for the sake of appearances, “in a sense, I suppose, we are all devil worshipers in modern society—always have been. It is fear that rules and we fear the bad—not the good.”
As we waited, I felt, more and more, the sense of the mysterious, the secret, the unknown which have always exercised a powerful attraction on the human mind. Even the aeroplane and the submarine, the X-ray and wireless have not banished the occult. ”

“ Maude Schofield.
“I have heard of your eugenic marriage contests,” began Kennedy, “more especially of what you have done for Mr. Quincy Atherton.”
“Well—not exactly a contest in that case, at least,” corrected Dr. Crafts with an indulgent smile for a layman.
“No,” put in Dr. Schofield, “the Eugenics Bureau isn’t a human stock farm.”
“I see,” commented Kennedy, who had no such idea, anyhow. He was always lenient with anyone who had what he often referred to as the “illusion of grandeur.” ”

“ As she rose and retired, with a hasty apology to Whitecap for her indiscretion, Kennedy turned to me and exclaimed, “Think of it. The deadliest of all habits is the simplest. No hypodermic; no pipe; no paraphernalia of any kind. It’s terrible.”
She returned to sit down and enjoy herself, careful not to obtrude herself on Whitecap lest he might become angry at the mere sight of her and treasure his anger up against the next time when she would need the drug. ”

“ Vaughn,” continued Craig, as if goading him to the point of breaking down his calm silence, “you are specialist enough to know these things as well, better than I do. You must know that epilepsy is one of the most peculiar diseases.
“The victim may be in good physical condition, apparently. In fact, some hardly know that they have it. But it is something more than merely the fits. Always there is something wrong mentally. It is not the motor disturbance so much as the disturbance of consciousness.”
Kennedy was talking slowly, deliberately, so that none could drop a link in the reasoning. ”

“ In fact, there seemed to be innumerable problems—to warn Baron Kreiger, to get the list of the assassinations, to guard Miss Lowe against falling into the hands of her anarchist friends again, to find the murderer of Fortescue, to prevent the use of the electro-magnetic gun, and, if possible, to seize the anarchists before they had a chance to carry further their plans.
“There is nothing more that we can do here,” remarked Craig briskly, betraying no sign of hesitation. “I think the best thing we can do is to go to my own laboratory. ”

“ Kennedy was now looking at them curiously.
“What is to be the method, do you suppose?” I asked.
“By a poison that is among the most powerful, approaching even cyanogen,” he replied confidently, tapping the cigarettes. “Do you smell the odor in this room? What is it like?”
“Stale tobacco,” I replied.
“Exactly—nicotine. Two or three drops on the mouth-end of a cigar or cigarette. The intended victim thinks it is only natural. But it is the purest form of the deadly alkaloid—fatal in a few minutes, too.” ”

“ Kennedy was forging straight ahead now in his exposure. “Crotalin,” he continued, “is one of the new drugs used in the treatment of epilepsy. But it is a powerful two-edged instrument. Some one who knew the drug, who perhaps had used it, has tried an artificial bite of a rattler on Veda Blair, not for epilepsy, but for another, diabolical purpose, thinking to cover up the crime, either as the result of the so-called death thought of the Lodge or as the bite of the real rattler at the Lodge.” ”

“ Pearcy,” he went on.
“Warner Pearcy?” asked Craig. “Was he here last night?”
“Nearly every night,” replied Josephson, now glib enough as his first excitement subsided and his command of English returned. “He was a neighbor of Mr. Minturn’s, I hear. Oh, what luck!” growled Josephson as the name recalled him to his present troubles.
“Well,” remarked Kennedy with an attempt at reassurance as if to gain the masseur’s confidence, “I know as well as you that it is often amazing what a tremendous shock a man may receive and yet not be killed, and no less amazing how small a shock may kill. ”

“ Kennedy paused, making use of the silence for emphasis. “You have all read of the wealth that Cortez found in Mexico. Where are the gold and silver of the conquistadores? Gone to the melting pot, centuries ago. But is there none left? The Indians believe so. There are persons who would stop at nothing—even at murder of American professors, murder of their own comrades, to get at the secret.”
He laid his hand almost lovingly on his powerful little microscope as he resumed on another line of evidence. ”

“ He had more of human than scientific interest in a case of a woman of her caliber gone wrong.
“But you must have read of the famous Moulton diamonds?”
“Yes,” said Craig, blankly, as if it were all news to him.
“Schloss has them—or at least had them. The jewels she wore at the opera this winter were paste, I understand.”
“Does Moulton play?” he asked.
“I think so—but not here, naturally. In a way, I suppose, it is his fault. They all do it. The example of one drives on another.”
Instantly there flashed over my mind a host of possibilities. Perhaps, after all, Winters had been right. ”

“ As nearly as I can gather, there was an impression that some of Northrop’s stuff would be valuable in proving the alleged kinship between Mexico and Japan, perhaps to arouse hatred of the United States.”
“Yes—that is all very well,” insisted Kennedy. “But how about the treasure?”
“Treasure?” repeated Bernardo, looking from one of us to another.
“Yes,” pursued Craig relentlessly, “the treasure. You are an expert in reading the hieroglyphics. By your own statement, you and Northrop had been going over the stuff he had sent up. You know it.” ”

“ Finally Jermyn turned to Kennedy and looked him squarely in the eye. “Kennedy,” he said slowly, “this is extraordinary—most extraordinary,” then, pausing, added, “if true.”
“There can be no doubt of the truth,” replied Kennedy, eyeing Dr. Jermyn just as squarely.
“What do you propose to do about it?” asked the doctor.
“Investigate,” replied Kennedy simply. “While Waldon takes these things up to the undertaker’s, we may as well wait here in the boat. I want him to stop on the way back for Mr. Edwards. Then we shall go out to the Lucie. He must go, whether he likes it or not.” ”

“ It was a far cry from the wealth of Diamond Lane to a dingy Bowery pawnshop, even though pawnbroking at one per cent. a month—and more, on the side—pays. I knew, too, that diamonds are hoarded on the East Side as nowhere else in the world, outside of India. It was no uncommon thing, I had heard, for a pawnbroker whose shop seemed dirty and greasy to the casual visitor to have stored away in his vault gems running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Mrs. Moulton must know of this,” remarked Kennedy. “Winters, you and Jameson bring Muller along. I am going up to the Deluxe.” ”

“ We took the ladder quietly back to the garage, then Kennedy led the way down the shore to a sort of little summerhouse cut off from the boathouse and garage by the trees, though over the top of a hedge one could still see the boathouse tower.
We sat down, and Craig filled his lungs with the good salt air, sweeping his eye about the blue and green panorama as though this were a holiday and not a mystery case.
“Walter,” he said at length, “I wish you’d take the car and go around to Verplanck’s. I don’t think you can see the tower through the trees, but I should like to be sure.” ”

“ I listened, fascinated by Kennedy’s explanation.
“Anyone can see that that woman has something on her mind besides the heroin habit. It may be that she is trying to shake the habit off in order to do it; it may be that she seeks relief from her thoughts by refuge in the habit; and it may be that some one has purposely caused her to contract this new habit in the guise of throwing off an old. ”

“ Our quest took us to a rather dilapidated old house on the outskirts of the little Long Island town. The house stood alone, not far from the tracks of a trolley that ran at infrequent intervals. Even a hasty reconnoitering showed that to stop our motor at even a reasonable distance from it was in itself to arouse suspicion.
Although the house seemed deserted, Craig took no chances, but directed the car to turn at the next crossroad and then run back along a road back of and parallel to that on which Annenberg’s was situated. ”

“ Every day the medical detective plays a more and more important part in the detection of crime, and I might say that, except in the case of crime complicated by a lunacy plea, his work has earned the respect of the courts and of detectives, while in the case of insanity the discredit is the fault rather of the law itself. ”

“ Inside was a beautiful little “Peke,” and it was easy to see that Buster was indeed ill.
“Who is your doctor?” asked Craig, considering.
“Dr. Rae Wilson, a very well-known woman physician.”
Kennedy nodded recognition of the name. “What does she say?” he asked, observing the dog narrowly.
“We haven’t told anyone, outside, of it yet,” replied Mrs. Blake. “In fact until Buster fell sick, I thought it was a hoax.”
“You haven’t told anyone?”
“Only Reginald and my daughter Betty. Betty is frantic—not with fear for herself, but with fear for me. No one can reassure her. ”

“ Such people are easily reached in time of peace and in time of war, also, by sympathizers on their own side. That’s it, you see—we have followers of all nationalities.”
She stopped, her burst of enthusiasm spent. A moment later she leaned forward, her clean-cut profile showing her more earnest than before. “But, oh, Professor Kennedy,” she added, “it is working itself out to be more terrible than war itself!”
“Have any of the plans been carried out yet?” asked Craig, I thought a little superciliously, for there had certainly been no such wholesale assassination yet as she had hinted at. ”